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Twitter is the wrong place to "build an audience"
by
Chris McCormick
https://thenextweb.com/tech/2019/06/11/most-popular-social-media-networks-year-animated/
Twitter feels like one of the best places to build an audience. The retweet mechanism makes it very easy to grow over time if you're putting out helpful content. The aggressive length limit allows you to contribute consistently without the many hours required to write a newsletter or a blog. And it's full of helpful, intelligent, ambitious people who tend to make for good customers, including your fellow indie hackers.
Agree 100%. Perhaps OG meant "build an audience without putting in the work"?
No what I meant was that people should challenge themselves to look at these raw numbers and think about whether their audience is actually on Twitter. It's the go-to platform for Indie Hackers, but is it where your customer actually hangs out?
For somebody like @csallen it obviously is because it's where all us indie hackers are, but lets say your customer is super into knitting, or some other niche interest, are you going to find the knitting club on Twitter? Seems more likely you'll find them in a sub-reddit or a Facebook group, or maybe even some private forum. I was surprised to see that the majority of social media users are on Facebook not Twitter.
I guess I am just saying it makes sense to review your assumptions about building an audience and look around a little. Your efforts may be best spent on a different platform.
Any place where your prospective customers are not hanging out is the wrong place to build an audience.
For FeedbackPanda, we were in Online English Teacher Facebook groups and built a community there.
For my book Zero to Sold, I built a following on Twitter in the indie hacker / founder community.
For my current SaaS PermanentLink, I am on Reddit and on Twitter, both places where authors hang out.
You have to embed yourself into your future audience's hunting grounds, hang out around their water coolers. Wherever that may be.
Exactly my thought! Thank you.
The linked article is super interesting, but disagree with the title.
The platform for building an audience depends a lot on where your audience is, how they consume content about your niche (written, video, etc), and where they consume content about your niche.
Trying to build an audience on LinkedIn with beauty tutorials probably isn’t right, but posting career building advice doesn’t fit into Instagram.
Agree.
I wonder how the stats have changed in the past year.
I don't think it is the wrong place though, not for people like us. 🤓
Yes you're right, I guess it depends what you're making and where your customers hang out. I recently realized that the community for one of the things I'm building is vastly better represented on Facebook than on Twitter. I think the "maker community" is well represented on Twitter like you said.
I think that's it exactly. Most my friends and family never tweet. It's just my journalist friends, about 1/3 of my programmer friends and that's about it. Maybe a bit higher percentages for my friends in Japan.
Really depends on your product. If it's visual based, such as fashion, then probably Instagram or TikTok is better. If it's based on having interesting connections to people, then Twitter is better.
This is encouraging! I hate Twitter, so I’m patiently waiting for it to die.
Click bait?
All depends on the market
I also don't particularly want to use tiktok as I prefer writing to speaking.
What the hell was ORKUT by the way? haha
What do people think is the platform risk of Twitter?
In other words, if I build up a nice big audience, what could happen to make Twitter quickly useless for me?
I'm just thinking of the way I started a publication on Facebook in 2012 and initially, all our page likers saw all of our posts. And then suddenly Facebook turned around and decided that only 10%/5%/2% of likers would see posts unless we paid them loads of money.
Do we think that won't happen with Twitter?
A friend of mine built her business on Facebook and was getting great results, but then they changed a bunch of specific UI that nearly crushed her business. I think the key to avoiding platform risk is a) to find multiple places where your customers spend time and b) create your own community for them.
It depends on what customers are you target, if you are into B2B, twitter can be a handle platform to build your audience.
This comment was deleted 5 years ago